Oscars 2024: Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla Enters the Chat

A24 will release Sofia Coppola’s film, Priscilla, about the romance between Elvis Presley and Priscilla. Here is the trailer:

Coppola is in familiar territory here with an older man and younger female relationship. It started with Lost in Translation, with Bill Murray becoming a mentor of sorts to Scarlett Johansson, then she followed that with Somewhere, which explored the relationship between Elle Fanning and her father while on tour.

Innocent young female/older wiser male is Coppola’s comfort zone as a filmmaker. Coppola described the film as closer to Marie Antoinette, as Priscilla was “going through all the stages of young womanhood in such an amplified world.”

There are some photos posted in a Reddit group for Elvis that have been reprinted on the web, but I can’t post them here because they might be protected and I don’t want to get sued.

What I notice right away about the casting of Cailee Spaeny is how young she looks. That’s the big difference here, as far as I can tell. Usually we see Priscilla looking very much like an adult, as opposed to a young teenager, as she was when Elvis began courting her for marriage. But Spaeny, who is 25, really can “pass” as a very young looking girl, which is kind of important in telling this story in 2023, the main reason is that “social justice warriors” will be all over the age difference between them.

I took my niece to see Elvis and she said after the movie ended, “he was a pedophile.” That is going to be the main topic around the film, particularly since Coppola has been a target for various reasons in the past. I won’t go into it because it annoys me too much, but suffice it to say they will be out in force screeching in all sorts of ways about this probably. The point is that I don’t think Coppola is going to dodge that part of the story and will leave space for audiences to sit uncomfortably with their relationship.

I would just say, as usual, things were different then. They weren’t just different back in the 1950s, but they were very different in Tupelo, Mississippi when Elvis was growing up. I grew up in the 1970s and even back then you had Tatum O’Neil at 11 years-old talking about smoking and taking the pill. Parents were more protective in the 1950s than they were in the 1970s, but even still, they didn’t see it quite the same way as they do today. On Twitter, they think a relationship with a 19 year-old is “pedophilia.”

Elvis famously said that he waited until “Scilla” was 18 before doing the deed. According to Cheatsheet, an excerpt from her book, Elvis and Me, she said:

“For the last time I begged him to consummate our love. It would have been so easy for him. I was young, vulnerable, desperately in love and he could have taken complete advantage of me. But he quietly said, ‘No. Someday we will, Priscilla, but not now. You’re just too young.’”

But she also said, ““Instead . . . he began teaching me other means of pleasing him. We had a strong connection, much of it sexual. The two of us created some exciting and wild times.”

There is not going to be any around this. It is strange that there is such cognitive dissonance between expanding sexual exploration and disappearing boundaries in the world of LGBTQIA but where a “white cis-gendered heteronormative male” is concerned, that will ignite the hysteria that has driven so much of our cultural upheaval in the past decade.

Either way, Coppola is, to me, a filmmaker always worth paying attention to and is one of the few who has a distinct eye. We know that Graceland will be brought to life in ways we’ve never seen it before because that is exactly the kind of thing she is obsessed with, along with the fashion of the time.

As far as the Oscars go, Coppola enters a field alongside Greta Gerwig and Emerald Fennell. It’s potentially building a scenario where three previously Oscar-nominated female directors going head-to-head with wildly different films. That is unheard of, and should be something to celebrate.

She’s bringing with her usual team:

Editing: Sarah Flack
Cinematography: Philippe Le Sourd
Costumes: Stacey Battat